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	Web Exclusive: Backsliding into Disgrace By Andrew M. Brown Spectator June 3, 2010 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/6055208/web-exclusive-backsliding-into-disgrace.thtml Everything started to unravel for the Rev George Alan Rekers last month after he was photographed at Miami airport in the company of a male prostitute called Jo-vanni Roman. 'Christian right leader takes vacation with "rent boy"', bellowed the headline in the Miami New Times on May 6. Roman, 20, advertises on the website Rentboy.com, and he and Rekers were returning from a ten-day jaunt to Spain and England. Rekers, 61, is a Southern Baptist minister. He is married with children, and he insists that there was nothing improper about the trip. He simply needed help carrying his luggage after an operation. And as an added bonus, ‘my travel assistant ... did let me share the gospel of Jesus Christ with him with many Scriptures in three extended conversations.’ Roman, on the other hand, says there was more to it: the churchman enjoyed daily massages ‘down there’. The episode has been acutely embarrassing for Rekers because he was known as an ardent proponent of 'conversion' or 'reparative' therapy, which attempts to re-orientate people from homosexual to heterosexual. Prominent Christian groups he used to be involved with, such as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth), now want nothing to do with him. He is only the latest in a long line of humiliated evangelical ministers. In born-again circles, these personal upsets are euphemistically termed 'back-sliding'. Recently, they have occurred at a rate of roughly one a year. Jim Bakker, the televangelist, was a spectacular case back in the 1980s. Through their own television network, he and his wife Tammy Faye fervently preached the 'prosperity gospel'. This glitzy, success-based interpretation of scripture – also known as 'health and wealth – was perfect for the time. It placed an unabashed emphasis on jangling gold jewellery, Rolls Royces, crocodile-skin shoes and the like, as signs of God’s munificence. Bakker’s downfall mixed sex and fraud in an irresistibly juicy package. A secretary named Jessica Hahn, who later posed in Playboy, accused him of rape – he protested his innocence – and he was jailed for embezzling from a planned theme park. The biggest recent victim of backsliding is Ted Haggard. ‘Pastor Ted’ headed the National Association of Evangelicals and occasionally advised the White House, although after his exposure, senior evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell quickly marginalised him. A male prostitute called Mike Jones accused Pastor Ted of paying him for sex plus drugs – methamphetamine – over three years. Haggard admitted most of it, underwent counselling supervised by ministers and emerged, in his own phrase, ‘heterosexual with issues’. I am not suggesting, of course, that only born-again Christians fall from grace. Any religion that preaches high moral standards contains within it the potential for hypocrisy. The Catholic Church is currently working through the unspeakable scandal of child abuse. The Orthodox churches in North America, Greece and Serbia have been caught up in financial irregularities. But I do think there is something distinctive about the way born-again Christian religion works, which means that the personal collapses of its ministers appear especially dramatic, sometimes farcically so. My feeling is that it has something to do with the power of the minister. Added to that, there is the strain that extreme Protestant theology places on its adherents. Evangelicals are independent operators, and this is crucial. In the Catholic Church, the hierarchy tried to conceal the offences of abusing priests by shifting the offenders to different parishes. The idea was to protect the faithful from scandal that might undermine their faith. As everyone now knows, this policy caused an immeasurably greater scandal once the cover-up was exposed. The guilt tainted the whole church like a miasma. Evangelicals, on the other hand, have no hierarchy. They have no one to oversee or protect them. When something goes wrong, the scandal affects individuals. So what causes the backsliding? Well, think of the strain. These are people who have devoted their lives to an intense version of Protestant Christianity. Many were brought up in strict families. They may never have let their hair down. Now, in prosperous mid-life, something happens: the morally blameless facade cracks up, they get bored, they begin to crave the thrill of high-risk activity. Perhaps endlessly contemplating the sins of the flesh corrodes their resolve. Then there are the pressures of the business: the pastor has got to keep the show on the road. He points to his booming attendances, and the cash rolling in, as proof of God’s approval. What if the numbers start to fall off? How do you explain that? It may become a terrifying high-wire act. And it is an act, or rather a performance, because no religious tradition models itself more closely on show business. The minister is imbued with the quasi-magical powers of a comic book hero. It’s a dizzying mixture of temptations: show-biz-style adulation, money and on top of that, you believe your place in Heaven is waiting for you. There is ample opportunity to stray, too, since many preachers are itinerant by nature, always away from home on lecture tours – or holidays like George Rekers. Many of these born-again leaders exercise what the sociologist Max Weber termed ‘charismatic authority’. This means that parishioners regard them as practically super-human or, at least, possessed of exceptional qualities. A personality cult can grow up. The minister may start to believe himself to be beyond reproach. Parishioners will fear to criticise him. Again, this process can happen, to some extent, with ministers of other denominations - Catholic, Anglican or whatever. But think how magnified the effect is when one preacher controls a mega-church with a congregation in the tens of thousands. Will Napier was pastor in one of the largest Pentecostal churches in Europe, Kensington Temple in Notting Hill. He is now a psychologist and humanist. He told me that in evangelical churches, ‘They believe they have a direct line to God. There are no checks and balances. And the evangelical environment is vulnerable to a Fascist style of leadership.’ Napier also thinks the pastor can develop what the philosopher Theodor Adorno called the ‘authoritarian personality’, where power compensates for unconscious weaknesses. Are disgraced preachers just blatant hypocrites, then, who project their forbidden desires onto others – like the beadle that King Lear imagines whipping a prostitute: ‘Why dost thou lash that whore? ... Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind / For which thou whipp’st her.’ Well, there is an element of that. And journalists naturally paint the stories in the most lurid colours. But the truth is bound to be more complicated. For one thing, never underestimate our capacity to deceive ourselves and to rationalise our weaknesses. The Miami New Times quoted from emails allegedly sent by Rekers to his companion. What strikes me is not that he is guarded in what he says, but the sincere innocence of the tone, the gushing exclamation marks. ‘I’d like to propose another trip to Rome, Italy, for a week or more,’ he writes on March 21. ‘This is so exciting to have a nice Travel Assistant and traveling companion! Wow! I’m so glad I met you.’ No inkling that this is someone setting up a depraved sexual transaction. He could be a schoolgirl telling chums about a trip to the seaside.
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